Women, feminism, and geek culture

GF classifieds: become a linkspammer to the stars!

Hi everyone,

For two years linkspam have been emerging from our anonymous Linkspamming team like clockwork. But a few are on hiatus right now and it’s again time to refresh the roster. We’d love to bring a few more linkspammers on board.

If you’re interested, read on.

What a Linkspammer does

A Linkspammer gathers together links submitted by readers (and optionally links they found themselves) and puts them on our blog in a linkspam post.

How the process works:

when you join the linkspamming team, you are subscribed to an email list where suggestions are sent and where you and other linkspammers can discuss things when needed

you sign up in advance to do linkspams in a schedule we maintain in Google Docs. Right now, you sign up to do either two Tuesdays or two Fridays in a row (eg, you might sign up to do Tues June 3 and Tue June 10), but this varies depending on how many spammers we have

in the 24 hours before your scheduled post, an email arrives which has gathered together link suggestions from comments here, from the bookmarking sites, and from Twitter

you paste that email into a WordPress post and start editing it, eliminating less good links entirely, and improving summaries, adding trigger warnings and such for the remaining links. You might optionally add links you’ve found yourself or sourced from somewhere else, but this isn’t needed.

you make the post live.

Most of the work of the linkspammer is now at step 4, where you exercise editorial judgement in including and order links and making sure all links have a representative quote or summary.

A Linkspammer needs:

to identify as a geek feminist or a geek feminist ally, and to generally like this blog

to be able to read and compose English similar to that in existing linkspams

ability to at least skim through links and summarise their content in a sentence or two, and warn for common triggers

familiarity with the WordPress posting interface (you don’t need to have adminned a WordPress blog, but you should have posted to one before, or otherwise have reasonable previous exposure to blog posting)

some editorial judgement: being able to decide if a link is worth sharing or not, and to select 6-12 links for the spam

able to plan a few weeks in advance and commit to producing linkspams when you said you would (with reasonable allowances for unplanned things, of course, we all have other things going on!)

ability to keep an eye on all the linkspams, just so that yours has new links in it

ability to put up with occasional public criticism, and apologise if you agree you made a mistake: sometimes our readers criticise linkspams, although not very often, and unless they violate the comments policy we will generally let the criticisms remain publicly visible.

willingness to read a moderate amount of email, as you’ll be part of discussions between Geek Feminism bloggers, and while our normal volume is 0–10 emails a week, in busy weeks it could rise to up to 40.

willingness to use Google Docs for scheduling and documentation

We’d like it if the Linkspammer(s) could commit to at least six months as a spammer, and can give at least a couple of weeks notice if they need to move on, so that their replacement can be found and work handed over.

The time commitment is around about one to two hours every time you sign up to do a linkspam post, perhaps a bit longer your first couple of times. You’ll do around two posts in every four to six weeks.

Please note: we cannot pay Linkspammers (or any other contributor), you will be working as an unpaid volunteer.

How to join us

Let us know in comments if you’re interested in helping out as a Linkspammer: make sure to leave an email address in the email address field.

Privacy note: because WordPress.com doesn’t allow a single post to have moderated comments, comments may be briefly made public if you’ve commented here before. We will make your volunteering offer private as soon as we can. Emails left in the email address box will not be publicly visible at any time.

We don’t need a whole resume, but a sentence about your previous involvement in geek feminism would be good, eg “I’ve been commenting here for months” or “I write about geek feminism stuff sometimes on my blog” or etc.

I just want to contribute links, not do entire linkspam posts!

We welcome your help! You can contribute links without having access to the blog or needing to tell us you’re interested. The best way to do this is to sign up for a Pinboard account and begin saving links there tagged “geekfeminism“.

If that doesn’t work for you, our automated link-gathering system now also checks the “geekfeminism” tag on the competing bookmarking sites Delicious and Diigo; the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter; and comments on existing linkspam posts. If it works better for you, make suggestions through any of those, they’re just slightly less well-tested than our Pinboard support.